Today in Herstory: Suffragists Fill Metropolitan Temple for Event Defending Their Cause (11mar1912)

Today in Herstory: Suffragists Fill Metropolitan Temple for Event Defending Their Cause

March 11, 1912: Though suffragists have many popular themes for speeches and meetings, tonight’s choice to challenge 25 objections to women having the vote has outdone them all in terms of drawing a crowd.


Inez Milholland, one of tonight’s speakers and the sister of fellow suffragist Vida Milholland.

Less than half of those who wanted to attend were able to pack themselves into New York City’s spacious Metropolitan Temple, but the crowd out on Seventh Avenue was assured that remarks made at the meeting would be repeated at an overflow gathering. The attendance apparently surprised the police, who initially sent just one officer, assigned to enforce the fire codes limiting the number of audience members.

Mary Jenney Howe presided at the meeting, using a large gavel to maintain order. She was ably assisted by a young woman who employed a cow bell to strictly enforce the five-minute limit on speakers, a necessity caused by the large number of myths that needed to be refuted.

The evening’s principal orators were well-known to the public and equally well prepared to defend the cause. They included labor lawyer Inez Milholland; author and Broadway performer Fola LaFollette, daughter of Senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Republican of Wisconsin and attorney Belle Case La Follette; writer and editor Charlotte Perkins Gilman and English suffragist Elizabeth Freeman.

It was Freeman who generated the most controversy by defending her fellow British militants:
Militancy hurts the cause, does it? No, I don’t think it does. You have only to read the history of the United States to get the answer to this question. You read in the newspapers of the destruction of property in London. In Boston they destroyed the tea. In London we broke windows.
Freeman then reminded her listeners of the violence and brutality inflicted on the militants by the British government through the police and explained that the reason they don’t simply work to replace the men who run the government is because their goal is to change the system itself.

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http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/03/11/today-in-herstory-suffragists-fill-metropolitan-temple-for-event-defending-their-cause/